


The Cloisonné Bird

by anomieow



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, Grief, Oral Sex, Post-Canon Fix-It, Trans Character, trans woman james
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:01:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25610071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow
Summary: She refers, of course, to the Chinese cloisonné side comb she’d somehow acquired during her time in the Opium Wars. Intricate bits of enamel, amber gold and moss green, oxblood red and the vital blue of the jay’s breast, all nested together in a stylized interpretation of a bird. She’d carried it with her their whole time in the Arctic. Secreted in the shaft of her boot or against her breast, it had witnessed first their hatred—hatred,he thinks, a hard little smile on his lips.Hatred, as though there was ever a time they did not love one another, ever a time their magnets did not nose round to the north of the other. It simply wore another face then, a grotesque mask.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 16
Kudos: 45





	The Cloisonné Bird

James sits before her mirror, hands busy in her dark hair. Bobby pins clasped in her teeth, brow creased in concentration. Surely she hears Francis enter, the soft wheeze of the old bedsprings as he sits down, but she does not turn from her reflection. Francis watches mute, rapt: each time he enters unacknowledged this garret room she’s claimed for herself he’s felled by reverence and not a little fear. The rest of the house is _theirs_ but not this room; here the smell is hers, the books in stacks along the walls, the tall and narrow bed where she sometimes invites him to lie with her. 

He is free to enter whenever he pleases, but may not be allowed to stay. Each time he crosses the threshold he feels a little like a a pilgrim dwarfed by the ribbed, soaring ceiling of St. Paul’s, or like Actaeon spying Artemis through trees, slavering hounds sniffing and hugging round his knees. And to think there was a time—a different lifetime, it feels on days as sultry and slow as this, a terrible other lifetime lived through by two other stunted souls—he might have spat out some barb about Narcissus. _Tell us about Birdshit Island, why don’t you, James?_ He can still taste the whiskey on his tongue, making him bristlingly brave. _That’s a capital story._

“Christ, but you’re lovely,” He breathes, almost as though to himself. 

“Hush,” she says, cocking her head in the mirror. “I’m trying to get the hang of these confounded pins.”

“Let me see,” he says, crossing the small room—stooping so as not to strike his head against the low ceiling—and takes one of the pins from the small heap at her elbow, picking it up carefully with his rounded fingertips as though he might crush it. Which is silly. It lacks altogether the glittering delicacy of her other barrettes and pins; the decorative combs with which she sweeps her dark, loose waves up and back from her ears. It’s a narrow thing, like a traditional u-pin except the two arms are pinched all the way together, and one is ridged. It looks like something that has fallen loose of an intricate engine. He lays it back down on her vanity with a tiny, tinny tap, leaning closer than necessary so that he can gather to himself a trace of her smell—tuberose, sandalwood, sweat. For there is much of that on both of them. It is late July, nearly her birthday, and the sudden sterling overcast has done nothing to dispel the stupefying heat. Outdoors the sun douses one’s flesh like oil, like anything you can’t wipe off. Indoors is only marginally cooler. 

Abruptly she turns her head to kiss him. It is so light a kiss, her lips like the beat of a moth wing against his, that if he didn’t know her better he’d think he imagined it. But he catches her eye in the mirror and it’s narrowed slightly, sharp with mischief.

“Perhaps I’ll just wear the cloisonné bird,” she muses. His breath catches in his throat. She refers, of course, to the Chinese cloisonné side comb she’d somehow acquired during her time in the Opium Wars. Intricate bits of enamel, amber gold and moss green, oxblood red and the vital blue of the jay’s breast, all nested together in a stylized interpretation of a bird. She’d carried it with her their whole time in the Arctic. Secreted in the shaft of her boot or against her breast, it had witnessed first their hatred— _hatred,_ he thinks, a hard little smile on his lips. _Hatred_ , as though there was ever a time they did not love one another, ever a time their magnets did not nose round to the north of the other. It simply wore another face then, a grotesque mask. Then their brotherhood, a triumph twinned with incalculable loss. Only when she was certain she was dying did she try to press it into his hand. This gift he did not accept—not at that cost. 

He did not see it again until they had been home some months. They rented an apartment in London for the first winter and kept to themselves to the extent society allowed them. James took a bath each night, a myriad of oils and scented cakes strewn round the feet of the tub, stoppered vials of crystals. Some nights she drank too much wine and sat as severely silent as a nun among her musky towering suds, a light scowl sometimes crossing her face as she mouthed something to herself. Francis tried to understand. At first he thought she was sulking. He simply hadn’t thought her the kind to be struck dumb by grief, to fold herself neatly up in her own silence. Not she whose voice had once seemed inescapable, invincible. But then, he had not expected to speak so openly of their losses as he did that winter. Franklin, Goodsir, Jopson, Little—the names of the lost he set free like so many small dark birds. Their grief demanded this inversion of roles. And then in the chill of early dark they’d lie together, pressed together so tight that the one’s breath ended where the other’s began. 

Then one night early in spring he felt her wake with a gasp and shoulder her way free of him in the darkness. She lit a candle and by its shuddering, ruddy glow found what she sought: the cloisonné comb. With it she swept her hair back from her sculpted cheekbones; the beautiful lines along her jaw etched deep as scars in the low light. Despite the cold she let her robe pool at her feet. Nude beneath, half tumescent. She crawled on her hands and knees into the bed and pressed his astounded fingers against it: the little cloisonné bird. The colors singing in the dark.

“I dreamed someone tried to take it from me,” she said simply. Then she kissed him, languorous yet searching, and he returned in kind. More than in kind, actually: he took her into his mouth, the whole fevered, pressing length of her, and with his nimble lips and tongue made her coo and sing and finally cry out as she spilled into him. The cloisonné bird slipping loose in her hair as she arced to meet his mouth, fill it. 

Now she plucks it out of the little hinged box where she keeps her hair baubles and works it into where the soft wave cups her ear. She turns in her chair to face him and he kneels, kissing lightly her bare knees. Outside the clouds give way and the room’s light shifts. The silvery, muffling light of a longed-for rain.


End file.
